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Elon Musk's 'Hyperloop': More Details Revealed
astroengine writes "Entrepreneur Elon Musk revealed details today about his concept for a high-speed transportation system he calls the Hyperloop. After tweeting that he'd pulled an all-nighter preparing for the announcement, Musk told Businessweek that the design could transport people as well as cars inside aluminum pods that move up to 800 miles per hour through a tube. The tubes would be mounted on columns 50 to 100 yards apart, not interfering with land needs because it would essentially follow major highways, such as I-75 in California."
The problem I see with this is while it's nice to dream about 800 mph travel, I can't imagine that it would be feasible to construct a track or tube that could follow the terrain at that speed and still maintain passenger comfort. If you are building above-ground supports, you don't want them to be 500 ft tall as would probably be required in order to keep the tube straight enough for passenger comfort and safety.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
I think it would be a much better replacement for freight trains and trucks. I'm guessing that may be their goal but they don't want to upset the train and trucker unions just yet. I'd say Amazon should get it on this as well to speed up their shipping times and hit their same-day delivery dream.
It seems like one could deter people from walking across the rails with some sort of symbolic notification device? To not reinvent the wheel, we could reuse the old inventions of "words" on a "sign":
WARNING
TRAINS GO THROUGH HERE
THEY GO REALLY FAST
IF THEY HIT YOU YOU'RE DEAD
EVEN IF YOU'RE DRUNK
or something.
We haven't roped off every cliff in the mountains, even though people die there. We've not even put warning signs on a lot of dangerous things ("WARNING: THIS IS A BEAR. DO NOT POKE IT. IT IS BIGGER THAN YOU. EVEN IF YOU'RE DRUNK.") Why do we need derp-proof railways?
I love it when simple obvious, and in this case old, technologies blow expensive and complicated technologies out of the water. Let's see, an old pneumatic message system with cars big enough for people. Cheap, easy to build, probably dirt cheap to run and maintain. Wow.
But there is huge problem with this system. Being so cheap and simple there is little room for massive companies to lobby/sell their complicated overpriced technologies. Tubes? How long is the list of companies that could build tubes? Pylons? How long is the list of companies that can build pylons? The train cars are a bit more limited but again not being maglev that list is still pretty long. Land purchases? I suspect that a bunch of insiders had land all lined up to sell.
Then you get other technocrats who don't like that their territory is being infringed. The rail people are probably scared that this might be independently run.
And lastly you get the aviation related interests that are far larger than most people might think. You have the oil refineries who will be unhappy to sell less fuel to both planes and cars, you have taxi drivers who run people to the airports, you of course have the airlines themselves, and you have the airports who will be unhappy to have fewer landings and takeoffs. Plus the no-doubt 50 unions who run the airports among others.
A tube system like this would be pure evil as far as those people are concerned dropping people off right down-town, how dare they.
Common sense would tell you that the earth is the center of the universe and the sun rotates around it.
Just because he can hire enough experts to do what has already been done or mostly done... doesn't mean he can do everything or anything. This isn't Paypal, which took existing technology and convinced people to use him rather than the banks. Nor is this SpaceX, which has taken existing technology and may (someday) provide commercial space travel by hiring existing experts. Nor is this Tesla, which took existing technology... I think you see the pattern.
(Seriously, if you believe that someones ability to eat a banana proves that that can ride a tricycle across a tightrope, you'd abandoned all common sense.)
still, your chances of surviving a car accident are overall pretty good. Your chances of surviving a crash at 800mph are 0.00000000%
The odds of surviving a crash don't much matter here - The odds of a crash do, for two reasons.
First, because the accident rate matters. You have made an argument appealing to the fatality rate, while ignoring whether or not tubes would have more or less total (fatal) accidents. If fewer than 350 100-passenger tube-pods crash per year, you have a net improvement vs cars. Comparing that to flying, if we had an average of one packed airplane going down in flames every day - We'd see commercial aviation end almost overnight. More to the point, people die in car accidents largely because people fail, not because their cars fail.
And second, bad things happen in car accidents beyond "death". Things (IMO) worse than death happen. And don't forget all the high-cost but not-worse-than-death injuries (broken limbs, major surgeries needed, etc). Yes, an 800MPH accident pretty much means trying to ID the bodies by searching for teeth with a sieve; that doesn't mean you get to just ignore all the "not quite dead" car accidents, which far outnumber the actual fatal ones.
/ And hey, if I really end up dying in an accident some day - I'll gladly take "you need to look for teeth with a sieve" over "watching myself and my family slowly bleed to death as paramedics try to cut us out".
I think Mr. Musk has demonstrated four times now that he is the financial equivalent of riding a unicycle across a tightrope while juggling bananas. Existing technology is useless if it never leaves the bench. (And Slashdot has 10394856 solar cell stories to prove it.) Elon Musk takes technology that's been languishing on the bench and turns it into viable companies. This is not exactly a trivial talent, or it would happen more frequently. His ability to put together a functional team of experts, then direct and fund them to success, is quite unusual. Doing it all on a budget 1/10th the size of other organizations (that still fail to deliver) is what really makes for an impressive performance.
Yes, I do see a pattern. I see a pattern of rather startling success, that "anybody" could have done. Except. They didn't.
So you're assuming that this guy, who has spent $zillions on engineers for his successful SpaceX endeavour (including ones who _really_ understand both subsonic and supersonic airflow and boundary layer effects, which are all critical elements of rocket design), and for his successful Tesla venture, has not spent dime one on engineers to work out the details? Hmm.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
People like him are the reason the middle class no longer exists.
...They all got up and made successful internet startups or car companies or space companies? Is that where the middle class went?
Or do you mean they no longer exist because they all stopped working at North American factories like Tesla or SpaceX?
Or do you mean they went somewhere else because they were no longer were inspired to be entrepreneurial because no-one had the spirit anymore or could prove it was possible to grow a successful business?
kind of like trains? we have those here in CA too, and have been successfully operating them through '89 Loma Prieta, Northridge in '94, and a plethora of smaller quakes.
nevermind all the local commuter trains like BART which include the transbay tube that runs for 4 miles on the BOTTOM of SF Bay and carries 400k commuters/day. was the only direct link to the east bay after Loma Prieta because the Bay Bridge broke.
Californians know how to deal with earthquakes. the building I'm sitting in right now rests on giant ball bearings so the ground can move under the building.
Feasibility: No new technology needs to be developed. It uses no exotic technology or materials. Think about the components: steel tubing, concrete pylons, solar cells, batteries, compressors, conventional electromagnets (no superconducting or rare earth magnets). It is an engineering and system integration problem. It is no where near as hard as what SpaceX and Tesla have already done. Tesla can supply the expertise for batteries and linear motor design based on their current experience.
Economy: The claimed price is $6 billion US. The price could be off by a factor of 3 and it would still cost half as much as the existing rail proposal. More then enough room for cost overruns. Musk experienced this already on SpaceX and it did not kill the company.
Benefits: It leapfrogs all existing high speed rail technology. It's a complete game changer. A successful outcome would immediately generate a world wide demand. There is a staggering amount of money to be made. In addition, it is ecologically very sound. The worst aspect is likely the amount of energy required for the concrete pylons, and that seems less then an equivilant roadway. Plus solar power is getting cheaper, so some of the price will go down in the long run.
If the US had any real capitalists around, they would jump at this opportunity. I expect without Musk it will go nowhere, because most big capital expects automatic government guaranteed profit. Although there have been some modest examples of innovative capitalism in the last couple of decades, for the most part capitalism in the US is non-existent, except for a few lone individuals.
Why is Snark Required?